Being lucky is sometimes a lot better than being skillful. I have been very lucky because years ago I decided to hang my skis on a mountain in Montana. Who would have thought that the Colorado and California snow report in the middle of January would be, “No new snow on five-to seven-inch base.” It has been a lot of years since I sat and looked at a ski hill in winter with no snow on it and sat in a restaurant at the base lodge full of disgruntled people who had traveled a long way to carve turns on Dollar Mountain on Sun Valley, Idaho.
Two weeks before this dismal afternoon of staring at sage brush, I had seen and filmed for the first time Walt Stopa’s artificial snow in Wisconsin. Today they call it man-made snow and it is the savior of many ski days across the country.
I tried to explain to Sigi Engl, who was then the ski school director, how the process of combining high-pressure air and high-pressure water could possibly make something as complicated as a snowflake.
As we stared at the chairlifts swinging gently in the wind but not moving up the hill that was covered with sagebrush, Sigi said, “Those artificial snow machines are probably pretty good back East where they don’t get much snow but we don’t need them out here in the West were we get a lot of it.” Yeah, sure didn’t look like it that day.
The other night a friend said, “These bad winters with no snow follow some sort of a seven-year cycle.” I asked him to explain what caused the cycle of seven years and he said, “That’s what my grandpa told me.” Unfortunately the source of the information is buried with his grandpa somewhere in Vermont where he had died.
For me, the fact that the weather cycle follows a lunar cycle rather than a solar one fits better in my hard drive. There are 13 months in an annual lunar cycle. If you pick any given month for the worst days of winter, in his grandpa’s theory, the same days will come up one month later every year. I think this last year it fell in September when they got a lot of snow at Crystal Mountain in Washington and at Mammoth during the same storm … and almost none since.
Come to think of it, I am a grandpa similar to that guy buried in Vermont. And I do wonder sometimes where all the knowledge you have stored up in a lifetime of learning goes when you eventually get buried.
Just as there are unexpected consequences when grandpa visits, there were the same problems with artificial snow making machines. A winter or two after Walt Stopa’s breakthroughs on his 186-vertical foothill, someone leased Soldier Field in Chicago and filled the bleachers up with wonderful invention and installed several rope tows. By the time they got the bleachers filled up with snow every water pipe in the stadium was frozen solid. Within two days the freshly fallen artificial snow had turned an ugly gray from all the coal-fired furnaces within a three-mile radius. The film I captured was reminiscent of some I took on the side of an erupting volcano in New Zealand years later.
By the time I showed the Soldier Field ski resort to my audiences the following year, the developer of the resort had filed for bankruptcy. The only survivor of this ski resort in the bleachers on man-made snow was the guy who ran the toboggan slide down between the goal posts and out into the end zone.
Maybe Sigi was right when he said, “that they only needed these snow machines back East.” Chicago just wasn’t far enough back East to have one that worked in Soldier Field.
To read more of Warren’s wanderings go to www.warrenmiller.net or visit him on his Facebook page at facebook.com/warrenmiller. For information on his Foundation, please visit the Warren Miller Freedom Foundation, at www.warrenmiller.org.